Every organisation delivers its services to its customers through a set of interrelated processes. Together these make up a complete service delivery chain of– all the activities that, together, ensure customers get the service they want. The problem is that in just about every organisation the individual processes that make up this chain are usually the responsibility of different departments, or teams, or people. For example, many processes need to come together for a council to provide a quality library service: recruitment and training of staff, payroll systems, purchasing systems, building repairs, cleaning, printing of documentation, marketing and publicity, and so on. All the customer is concerned about, however, is the quality of the final service, not the background processes. To deliver a quality service to the customer, it is vital that each individual process delivers what is required.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that the customer often does not receive the service that they expect given the many interrelated processes that have to be completed. The service delivery chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If any one process fails then the customer will not receive a quality service. The end result is usually one of the below -
- Increased customer complaints.
- Employee frustration and high attrition rate.
- Duplication of effort, lack of clarity on who is doing what.
- Business expenses increase.
- Inefficient use of resources, often a lot of resource is wasted too.
- Inability to grow the business due to bottlenecks.
So what does one do? How should you improve the situation? I usually follow a 6 step process to solve problems of this nature.